Skype went dark

Skype's bid to be seen as a credible business tool suffered a major setback yesterday when a major outage shut it down completely.

Millions of users who depend on Skype suddenly found themselves suffering from software problems and locked out of the network. The users were affected in worst outage since 2007. Even this morning some users are experiencing minor sign up problems.

Skype's Head Blogger Peter Parkes said that after it noticed the number of users online fell it found that its "supernodes" had failed. Supernodes are clusters of computer servers linked by peer-to-peer networking software. "Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype."

We are not sure about this. There was a rumour that some earlier versions of Skype were working fine. However those that rolled back their software to ancient editions could not connect either.

Skype claims to have fixed the problem by building new "mega-supernodes”. Things are gradually returning to normal. The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.